5. History

Programming languages date back almost to the invention of the digital computer in the 1940s. The first assembly languages emerged in the late 1950s with the introduction of commercial computers. The first procedural languages were developed in the late 1950s to early 1960s: Fortran (FORmula TRANslation), created by John Backus, and then COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language), created by Grace Hopper. The first functional language was LISP (LISt Processing), written by John McCarthy in the late 1950s. Although heavily updated, all three languages are still widely used today.

In the late 1960s, the first object-oriented languages, such as SIMULA, emerged. Logic languages became well known in the mid 1970s with the introduction of PROLOG, a language used to program artificial intelligence software. During the 1970s, procedural languages continued to develop with ALGOL, BASIC, PASCAL, C, and Ada. SMALLTALK was a highly influential object-oriented language that led to the merging of object-oriented and procedural languages in C++ and more recently in JAVA. Although pure logic languages have declined in popularity, variations have become vitally important in the form of relational languages for modern databases, such as SQL (Structured Query Language).